I recently completed this site in a hurry.
http://jlee.oopsmural.com/.

I want to know if its too slow for the backgrounds to load. And can anyone give some advice regarding better and friendly 'resize' images as thumbnails method?

Thank you.

trigger_tre

10-31-2006, 02:12 PM

First of all I really like the site. I like the waters where you opened the shutter.

The simple black and white use makes the photos stand out more. Everything seems to be working.

If you had macromedia flash that first image of the mountain would be a nice backdrop for some neat animation. Just an idea.

The only other thing I would recommend would be a "SiteMap" link. Its used alot by search engines and also people who want to find out all thats on your site without having to click on all the links.

As for the thumbnail views. The only bad thing about using plain thumbnails that link to blank pages with the normal size photo, is that this makes it easy for others to steal your photos and it doesnt look professional. When everything else on your site looks so professional and then OH! the thumbnail just links to a plain white page. A simple fix would be to change the background color of the that enlarged photos to black or something.

Their is a free little program I use on the site I am building for my church. Its a little finicky to setup but it can handle any size pictures its called simpleviewer. You can see it in action HERE
(http://harvestwhitecounty.com/galleries/pastorday_2006/index.php). With it being used in flash you can prevent people from printing the larger images.

There is another neat little script HERE (http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex4/lightbox2/index.htm) that might work for you. you could actually position it so that it lines up exactly within your site layout.

Just ideas,

-trigger

cryonic

10-31-2006, 05:56 PM

Oh sorry, it's Jollence's photos but I ll noted that to him ;) . He hasn't actually seen it yet.

Now when you mentioned something about FLASH, i wanted to avoid FLASH at all cost but it seems like i may need to use it when u mentioned about people stealing images. The original images were downsized by 80 percent so i won't worry much... hm... still worry..

Thanks for the dhtml link! I haven't been there for along long time. LOL. I 've totally forgotten... Yes 'almost' exactly what I am looking for. You got right to the point about those thumbnails. Now it seems... evitable i cannot escape auto-resize-images-by-percentage-for-thumbnail easily.

sitemap.... I wanted them to click on the link. And yes, I wanted to something for the index but it was really rushed.

Yes you are right about the images with white bg.

trigger_tre

10-31-2006, 08:19 PM

As for the sitemap....If you want people not to utilize it just put the "Sitemap" link somewhere towards the bottom, make it very small, and them make it the same color as your black background. This way you get the best of both worlds, search bots will still see it but visitors wont unless they happen to highlight it on accident.

As for my flash comment. IF you did any flash at all to the Home image (mountain), make it as minimal as possible. Im talking about one little mask effect or maybe have the clouds move in the background thats all. DONT do any wild flips, fly-ins, etc. those would take away from the simple, clean look of your site.

-trigger

DarkMage

11-01-2006, 08:21 PM

well, it does feel a bit odd as the background images appear after a certain amount of time. Could you possibly do some preloading script for the images (so it loads the pictures before showing the page?!) or possibly get a faster host. Other than that, the site looked rather good to me.
By the way, I also think that those thumbnails should open a smaller popup window when clicked... something that's just big enough to show the picture.

kineda

11-03-2006, 03:37 AM

The gallery text is a bit hard to read against the photo. Try increasing the contrast of your text with a different color other than white.

cryonic

11-03-2006, 07:01 AM

I still have to do something with the mainpage. Thanks trigger_tre, i modified the gallery section, also previously i forgot the horizontal nav bar appeared, i had it removed.

Sorry about too big bgs. I ll try to scale it down or cut it to pieces and c how it goes. Regarding the p texts in Gallery, I think green will do.

trigger_tre

11-03-2006, 04:41 PM

I am wondering if its your host. The main home page image loaded very slowly today and I have a descent connection. (the first time I viewed it the other day it was alot faster).

btw, the image gallery looks much more professional now.

Also on the image galleries:

1.) can you modify the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 so that the page a visitor is on is highlighted. This way if your gallery grows and someone spends 5 minutes looking at pics they will know what page they so they will know which page to visit next.

2.) the font that displays those numbers is odd in the since that 1 and 2 look smaller than 3 and 4. The font also makes the 3 and 4 #'s look subscripted.

cryonic

11-05-2006, 06:09 AM

i knew someone is going to comment on that. yes trigger_tre, i actually wanted to do that but decided to skip it and later on fix it. Yah, i am working on it, is just that it ll be slow cause i work in jungles too most of the times. thanks for reminding, i was hoping no1 could care less and ignore it.

the host was the most cheapest package, shared IP. apparently it isn't the host that's slow, it's our country network cable, it's usually fast. From what i heard they are upgrading at the moment, even my internet is abit laggy at peak hours. Sometimes, even the javascript doesn't load at all, which scares me.

btw i checked 'simpleviewer' and i think i am really interest in it.

crake2

11-05-2006, 07:20 PM

nice doesent take to long to load one think i dont like Jollence Lee Photography image at the top it just doesent go with the rest of the site

neither does the big image in the middle maybe its the colour or maybe its the size other than that well done